Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  (Such pronouncements—unconscious students in 10-A-II!—were by that point the topic of avid questions on the part of those who had no pedagogical dealings with Selbich. Even Julie Westphal, who after all was no spring chicken, always liked hearing the story retold of how her younger colleague and superior had presided over the class from her vertically extended desk.)

  Pius took the trip with more than the required accessories (blue shirt, toilet kit, fighting spirit). (He was traveling as the Pagenkopf/Cresspahl collective’s representative.) And so Gesine had paid a visit to Horst Stellmann’s on Stalin Street in Jerichow, asking him for an “instant” camera. – Eyes to the wood: Stellmann said, in the old soldier’s phrase, slightly pulling down the skin under his left eye with his finger; – Eyes peeled: Gesine responded, always willing to go along with the games a grown-up wanted to play. Stellmann dug up a Leica from his rearmost drawer, truly moved by the thought of how accommodating he was willing to be with Cresspahl’s daughter. But she wanted something less conspicuous, something that could pass the new luggage inspection at Nauen or Oranienburg without raising any suspicion of black-market dealings with West Berlin. Horst eventually brought out a humbler bellows camera, three hundred marks deposit instead of two thousand, which you could raise to the eye and then tuck away in nothing flat. How startled he was to catch a glimpse of Cresspahl’s daughter on Town Road in Jerichow on Whitsunday, nowhere near any surveillance activities in Berlin.

  Pius came back on the Tuesday after Whitsunday, reporting train delays that suggested a certain indifference on the part of railwaymen when it came to transporting young human freight in the interests of peace. Accommodations in a business school in Berlin-Heinersdorf, on straw; fistfights with students from Saxony over nighttime thefts; a five-hour shuffling march to the platform holding the country’s custodian and the head of the FDJ. Honecker was his name, not yet thirty-eight at that point, and he weighed the takeover of West Berlin against the bloodied heads of his Young Comrades. As compensation, he offered up something bizarre about potato bugs. Berlin residents annoyed at the blue-shirted visitors getting free rides on city transportation. Zaychik and Eva had made it to the expo at the radio tower. Dieter Lockenvitz set out for the Congress of Young Fighters for Peace, at Landsberg Avenue station on the ring road, with opening remarks by the poet Stephan Hermlin; he later said he’d gotten lost, and remained missing, untraceable. Pius knew what Gesine was waiting for but droned on and on; by then the two of us liked to tease each other, like a married couple. Finally she swallowed her pride and asked: Did you get her?

  Pius had her, in his box. The youthful, still confident principal, in charge of the delegation from Fritz Reuter High School, Gneez—how could he lose sight of her! She made it easy by falling into a helpless panic at the shy earnestness with which Burly Sieboldt, in Berlin too, tugged at her blue blouse, as though he wanted to reveal his admiration to both her and an audience. She was dazed, letting Pius follow her as if under a cloak of invisibility, until he eventually surprised her on Palace Street, Berlin-Steglitz, American Sector, West Berlin. Outside a shoe store—she was still just a young thing, Bettina was. When she saw Pius, camera raised, it must have dawned on her with a stab of anguish that she could not accuse a single student from Gneez of a peace-betraying excursion to West Berlin as long as one of them possessed a photograph showing the principal and FDJ-member succumbing to the temptations of capitalism on the level of commodity circulation. Which is why she tried to take his camera away. But Pius had strong hands, from gymnastics on the high bar; he also asked her, familiarly, if she wanted it to unload it for West marks. Wouldn’ advise that, Comrade. Since the West mark is about to collapse and all. (So that she could see at least some of what she extolled in her lessons as an economic law of nature had stuck with him.)

  Better safe than sorry. To be safe, Pius sent word apologizing to the head of the Gneez youth delegation (sunstroke; and through Axel Ohr, so that Bettinikin would suspect Student Cresspahl might be involved); he went home on a different rail line from the one on which the railwaymen were shunting the school transport back to Gneez. Horst Stellmann was simply delighted by the secrecy with which he was asked to develop the film; grownups are like that—letting themselves get distracted by the Western shop sign and not noticing the person under it. And that was where the Pagenkopf/ Cresspahl work collective let it stand in the campaign against Bettina Selbich; but she couldn’t know that. She defied our blank looks with a pride through which we could see a quaking terror. (Her gray eyebrows were a little mismatched; how I’d once enjoyed looking at them.) Were we unfair to her? Maybe. Until the end of the first week after Whitsunday—maybe, Marie.

  Marie is eager to hear if Bettina managed to keep it together instead of hightailing it out of Gneez. Moving somewhere she wouldn’t have to deal every day with students who had her in their power and pocket. Out of shame, if nothing else. There’s no way to solve this riddle, Marie, here in the murky aggrieved haze of Staten Island, with a view of the Verrazano Bridge’s west pier. Selbich hardly seemed up to defiance and the strength required for a move. Unless she’d decided, under that unevenly cut blond hair of hers, that the photographic evidence might just as well catch up to her in Zwickau, at the other end of the country. Would we have been so cruel? We might, if we had to be.

  End-of-year grades in Contemporary Studies: for Pagenkopf, B; for Cresspahl likewise, “Good.”

  – The look she gave me in Steglitz: Pius told me, about that scene on the corner of Palace and Muthesius Streets between the policewoman, caught in the act, and the thief, magnanimous: it was like what she wanted most of all was to bite me! Tssss! Like a snake. (Sometimes Pius acted younger than me.)

  It was just the two of us, tucked under the shoreline cliff west of Rande, muffled by the roar of the Baltic. True, one of us expanded on the description until we got to venom, snake-poison—but just between us. It must have been through osmosis that Bettina S. soon got a new nickname, first in our class, then throughout the school, and that this is how she is still remembered: “blond poison,” the German phrase for a blond bombshell. Selbich, The Blond Poison. TBP. After summer vacation in 1950, Julie Westphal told her about this sobriquet she’d acquired, pretending to do it out of pity. Luckily, the phrase’s author slipped through her fingers; our Blond Poison must have thought to the end that it was a malicious invention, not by accident.

  Whatever nicknames might say about a person’s behavior, Pius was safe thanks to his family and his apparently telling Bettina what she wanted to hear in a tone that was even more devout than was strictly required. Gesine had no nickname. Marie had one only in nursery school, in 1961– 62 (“our lil’ kraut”). And it is this young lady, the most steadfast of the children in the Cresspahl line though in no way the bravest, who asks a favor once we’re past the Verrazano Bridge. The trip to Czechoslovakia looms. Could we maybe test the waters in the restaurant on the East Side, where the people speak and act Czech?

  – Perfect! That’s why you’re wearing a dress instead of pants! That’s just what I have a checkbook in my bag for! Let’s go to your detested Svatého Václava!

  – On Riverside Drive I still thought we wouldn’t. Now I think I need it.

  It turns out Jakob reconsidered the visit he owed his mother (in Cresspahl’s house). He sent a photographic version of himself, taken privately, in postcard format. It showed a long swimming pier with a lifeguard’s station and Island Lake in Güstrow with boats in the water. Jakob sent his regards from a training course that had been unexpectedly extended. When he did lie, it was only to spare others’ feelings. A training course has breaks. In breaks you can take a girl out on a boat ride. And that was why Gesine Cresspahl had stuck out the Whitsunday sun in Jerichow, in her dress for special occasions, from the West—all she got for it was sunburned knees.

  July 29, 1968 Monday, Dirty Monday

  To be fair, if you look at it objectively, we do leave our apartment in the lurch when one of us g
oes to the corner of West End Avenue where the summer camp’s orange bus is waiting and the other one lets the subway whisk her from the Upper West Side to Midtown and the desolation of work; we leave our twenty-seven hundred cubic feet of inhabitable space floating in the wasteland of Manhattan’s architecture, unprotected, miles away, and that in a city where a dignified bum tries to steal Marie’s grocery cart while she’s watching through a window. Where, sitting on a bench by the river with Mrs. Ferwalter, we keep a wary hand on our brown paper package that contains nothing but laundry, at some cost to our intelligibility in the conversation. Where philanthropists passing through town count their cash outside in broad daylight, within reach of greedy observers, and a Mrs. Cresspahl grabs the wallet of this trusting man of the world, this Anselm Kristlein, and holds it tight at her side and only then apologizes for overfamiliar behavior. The fact is, we deserve punishment.

  And we’ve expected it. The statistical average of two murders a day in the five boroughs of New York suggests a daily quantity of additional crimes as well. Ever since our Mrs. Seydlitz, trusting the sharp eyes of the doorman who watches over the elevator doors in her building, nonetheless found herself facing a seventeen-year-old boy’s knife—his fear more dangerous than his weapon—we were disappointed, we shuddered slightly, at the fact that this course of probable everyday events had continued to pass us by. Now, after seven years here, it was our turn. Time to put behind us what the city administration’s criminal science bureau has specified, just for us, as the degree to which hitherto unrealized events are possible. So that we’ll be safe till the next iteration of what we’re owed.

  We enjoyed the bliss of the commonplace until Marie came home today to find a door with a dangling lock, which made her stop and listen and retreat downstairs; until Mrs. Cresspahl poked the lamely hanging piece of woodwork with a (gloved) finger and immediately noticed two crooked cracks in one of her storm windows. Marie has come to the point where she can laugh at the slow-motion gesture with which her mother raised both hands to her hair, and actually the hairdo was in almost as perfect shape as it had been when she’d left Mr. Boccaletti’s beauty salon. The apartment was trashed.

  We know what to do, we kept our fingerprints to ourselves for the time being and went down to the basement to use shamefaced Jason’s phone. But does the NYPD know what to do?

  New York Police Department: How do you know they came through the window?

  Citizen Cresspahl: Because the window’s broken.

  NYPD: You have children?

  C.C.: One.

  NYPD: Well then.

  C.C.: Are you planning to send someone over, or would you rather we just chitchat for a while?

  NYPD: When did you move in?

  C.C.: May 1961.

  NYPD: And when are you moving out?

  C.C.: Is there any chance that the law enforcement branch of government might want to see the scene of the crime in person?

  NYPD: You can fix the window yourself.

  C.C.: Then I guess I’ll turn around and ask a private agency.

  NYPD: Hey! Listen you, now calm down.

  By the time a boy in blue from New York’s Finest appeared, stranded in the doorframe, we could work out for ourselves what had happened before we arrived. The time was missing—the alarm clock stolen. But in some minute or another after 8:25 a.m., someone entered an empty lobby on Riverside Drive. At 243 Riverside Drive, to be exact, where there’s always supposed to be someone watching out for our money, either Eagle-Eye Robinson or Esmeralda. A glance to the left of the elevator, at the open door to the stairwell, which according to fire regulations is to be kept closed at all times. How often we’ve daydreamed of taking a razor and cutting the thread tying the door to the heating pipe! Someone in a hurry, someone who doesn’t belong here, settles for the next floor—apartment 204. Since the elevator is in motion right next to it, he has to manage with a few stabbing strikes around the clever stupid lock, with a mighty blow that rips out the chain anchored to the frame (by four two-inch screws). He sees from the keyhole that the people here can lock the door from the outside; if anything moves inside then they’re home. Silence. In he goes. Puts the brass cylinder back where it was, more or less, so as not to be noticeable. What does he see?

  Salvation Army furniture on hardwood floors (no rug), casually laid out, as if no one here ever had to turn their back on each other. Luxury? Yes, two windows facing the western light of Riverside Drive, the woodsy park, the distant glittering of the river. Waste of effort. Better to scram.

  But no, maybe he’s thirsty, and there’s a friendly refrigerator just waiting for him, to the left of the door. If someone gets mad because what he wants isn’t there for him—a cold beer—he’ll pull out one shelf after another, everything bangs gently onto the tiles, mixing the tomato paste, mustard, milk, and liverwurst. From that point on he leaves traces, our visitor.

  Along the back wall of the middle room there’s a structure of wood and glass—perfectly natural that the green curtain might scare a person. There’s a key in the lock, but how could anyone know that, a few blows here and there does the job too. Books. More books. Still, people keep money in books, between the pages, he’s heard that. The empty books anger him and he swipes them off the shelves by the row, including those that are too old for such treatment. Outline of the History of Mecklenburg, by Paschen Heinrich Hane, second preacher in Gadebusch, printed 1804, unlisted in ADB, NDB, Brunet, Kraesse, Cat. Schles.-Holst. State Bibl.—the fragile leather spine on that one breaks; likewise Everyman’s History of Mecklenburg, in Letters, Printed in Neubrandenburg by C. G. Korb, Printer to the Grand Duke, 1791, motto: Moribus et hospitalitate nulla gens honestior aut benignior potuit inveniri. Yeah, right! Stomp.

  The secretary that the Dane left us glances over with its many drawers, all with locks, better we just break it open, the glassed hutch too. Ha, some loot! A folder with Taxes written on it. Still, taxes have to do with money. Overwhelmed with the presence of mere information, he’ll fling that across the room into the slimy sauce of edibles and broken glass.

  To the right he sees curtained glass doors, they give way under a light kick revealing a room with a fleece carpet, a child’s painting al fresco on the white wall, a table with a typewriter. All right then! We’ll take that.

  The tenant has sent her child down to the lobby, under the super’s protection, to wait for the NYPD. The tenant herself is waiting in, as close as possible to the middle of, the room. Before her calm eyes the front door opens, rustling in the breeze, a finger reaches in. She says to the hand: Marie, je t’en prie! but the body part belongs to a different person, a man, who shows his confused, half-polite face and stutters. Must’ve made a stupid mistake, sorry, he’ll just try the stairway door next to this one. All while taking slow backward steps from the woman. She watches him knock next door, until a second man, invisible behind the wall, comes up in the stairway and tells his friend, as if they were alone: Good idea to take care of the super. Both stumble off, abashed but relaxed before the unarmed female, only starting to run when they get to the super’s floor, and they burst out the last door onto Ninety-Sixth Street into a cop car, which traps them in the corner of the sidewalk with the bridge underpass, because Citizen Cresspahl is shouting something excitedly, in Italian: Al ladro! Al ladro! Fermateli!

  Then Marie has finally followed her out and for the first time ever she sees handcuffs being used for real. (All things considered, it feels like something performed for her, a fairy tale—all going off without a hitch.)

  Admittedly, these two men don’t have anything on them, and the policemen were only trying to do a (clearly hysterical) lady a favor, but after they’d traipsed around all the addresses the gentlemen supplied and found no place of residence anywhere, after one had tried to slip away from them into a subway station packed with rush-hour traffic, the team of patrolmen, one after the other, called up Citizen Cresspahl asking for forgiveness and thanking her—her assistance had given them some poi
nts in the precinct bosses’ tally; the suspects were junkies, too. – You did the right thing, ma’am! Calling us right away, that takes care of it.

  Meanwhile the man with the powder had come and he was dusting the shards of window on the floor with his little brush; with Marie watching him so closely as he worked, he’d rather have taken the whole window with him. His partner had found marks from the crowbar on the bottom frame, and, on the hooks attached to the outside wall that the window washers use for their belt, a belt for window washers, and, on the sidewalk below the window, a bucket with wash rags inside that had fallen over.

  Do we insist on filing a complaint, which would only make more work for the NYPD? We ask for a police report.

  Missing: One portable typewriter with European keyboard. One short-wave radio, on which we listen to the water levels in the ČSSR every night. A tape recorder, including the tape from Saturday (gone: one Blond Poison), in fact all the cassettes that would have been gathered and sent to a bank vault in Düsseldorf the day after tomorrow. One document folder with private correspondence and nothing but some loose change, not even a foreign passport. Such a hurry he was in, no? (Except that our visitor found the time to fill the toilet bowl almost to the rim with his indigestibilia.) And? One leather bag from Switzerland, big, with stamped initials. For carrying stuff away with, first, before repacking, y’see? Your initials, if you don’t mind, on the double.